Tips and Tricks In Your Inbox!

This is totally cool. I was not a big fan of those glorified bookmarks, but when I saw the Chrome OS app launcher menu, well, I liked it! I recently published an article with a workaround to get Chrome OS apps menu on Chrome. The Chrome OS like app menu is going to be a built-in feature of Chrome very soon.

How To Get Chrome OS App Menu on Chrome

This feature is available only on Chromium builds for now. But we will see this pretty soon on Canary builds and then Dev build. If you can’t wait, go ahead and download the latest Chromium build from here.

Once you have one of these, open chrome://flags and enable the flag Show Chromium Apps Launcher. Re-launch the browser and you are ready to go.

You will get the app menu icon on your windows taskbar. This menu will be present even after you close Chrome. So, next time you want to open Chrome and then open gmail, you can click the gmail app from this app menu and save some clicks.

Here is the commit message for the new feature from the Chromium code base.

Add a flag to control whether there is a shortcut for the app list / launcher in the Windows taskbar.

When the flag is on, a shortcut will be created and pinned if it doesn’t exist. When it is off, the shortcut will be deleted if it exists.

The app menu wouldn’t have been this cool if it disappeared when we close Chrome. It is really useful to have that icon on your taskbar, always! I tested this on Windows 8 PC, works neat.

After testing it for a while if you think you don’t need this menu, you can disable the flag and re-launch Chrome and you should be good. Chrome will remove the app launcher icon from your windows taskbar.

It would be better if this feature has come as a menu item or button in Chrome Native. In Chrome, this function Actually, I do not know if they already have in their own Chrome and I just do not know. In Chrome, this shortcut can now be created in the Windows taskbar.
Thanks.